May 18, 2006 - Sale 2080

Sale 2080 - Lot 12A

Unsold
Estimate: $ 85,000 - $ 105,000
PARKINSON, RICHARD (1844-1909)
Rare collection of 44 photographs of the indigenous people of the Bismarck Archipelago (New Guinea). Printing-out paper prints, 5 3/4x8 inches (14.8x20.3 cm.). 1890s
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Nineteenth-century photographic expeditions to the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa were undertaken regularly by adventurous practitioners from the 1850s-1880s. However, it was the rare, and ambitious, European photographer who journeyed to the exotic and remote locale known as New Guinea, a group of volcanic islands and islets in the southwest Pacific Ocean.

Danish-born German colonist Richard Parkinson, who traveled widely throughout the Melanesian islands now known as New Britain, New Ireland, New Hanover, Manus, Buka, and areas of Papua New Guinea, created in the process a landmark ethnography of the Bismarck Archipelago. Parkinson's pictorial and written observations included compelling portraits of native peoples; staged scenes of hunting and battle; and views of domestic, religious and ceremonial life in villages.

While he may not have been the first European to document local people, he clearly was among the first. And, more importantly, his photographic records of island societies occurred before the islanders were exposed to a host of alien influences conveyed by both western missionaries and those associated with the German railway system. He collaborated with A. B. Meyer to produce a magnificent two-volume "Album von Papua-Typen" (1894 and 1900), and in 1907 wrote his most enduring work "Dreissing Jahre in der Suedsee" [Thirty Years in the South Seas], in which a handful of these images appear.


New Guinea came under Imperial German administration in 1884. Although it received less attention than the newly acquired African colonies, the Germans had ambitious plans to develop their new South Seas possession. The intention was to limit colonial activities to the protection of the trading activities of Hamburg and Bremen companies under the principle, "the flag follows the trade." However, the reality was quite different and the German state was soon called to provide financial support for colonial activities.